Facebook’s shaky second chance
Why this platform can’t be like the last
Disclaimer: While I have written many times about chat networks and Facebook, I am now an advisor to Kik, a Facebook Messenger competitor.
At F8 on Wednesday, Facebook will likely announce that it is turning its Messenger into a platform for third-party apps. Messenger will be in position to become not just a communications tool, but a network for connection and exchange — a chat-based economy. Just last week, we saw the first step towards this vision with the announcement of a Messenger payment system. Knowing that “messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking” (as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year), Facebook is girding itself for what could be one of the most lucrative contests in personal computing, an opportunity worth perhaps tens of billions of dollars.
Asia has already demonstrated the enormous potential for such chat networks. In China, WeChat has for many of its 500 million users replaced the internet. People share photos, order taxis, redeem fast food deals, and purchase phones through the app. In Japan and Thailand, people use Line to play games, make phone calls, and buy virtual goods. Line is so pervasive that it has opened physical retail stores in these countries, selling stuffed toys to fans for whom manic digital stickers just aren’t enough. In South Korea, people can buy and sell their own products in KakaoTalk.
In short, these chat networks are what Facebook would have been if it were built today: a mobile-first social web. Facebook knows this, which is why the company is about to make a huge deal about Messenger at F8. The story will be strong, the zeal will be real, and, given the excitability of Facebook’s proponents, there will be praise.
But there also ought to be hard questions.
This is not Facebook’s first attempt at building a platform. In 2007, Zuckerberg stood on stage at F8 and announced plans for a social operating system. Independent developers would be allowed to build applications for Facebook and have a shot at wooing its then 500 million users. Photos, videos, music, games, news, marketplaces, pages, groups, events — it was all in play. For a moment.
Faced with quality control issues and an epidemic of spam, Facebook was forced to keep tweaking rules that were never set in stone in the first place. Developers, at the mercy of Facebook’s will, would lurch from giddy highs to sudden lows, their traffic pinched and squeezed with every algorithmic conniption. Then, Facebook went against its initial promise to provide an agnostic platform for developers by building its own versions of all the important apps, crushing would-be partners in the process. Even though Facebook would go on to accrue more than 1 billion users, its platform, which had iOS-like potential, foundered. Aside from games, can you name a single killer Facebook app?
Eight years later, Facebook has become an airlock for advertising, with no other major source of revenue. Now it finds itself with an opportunity for redemption with Messenger. It is easier said than done.
For all its might and mass, Facebook remains a company hindered by the legacy of the desktop era in which it was incubated. It is a company that makes a lot of money selling mobile ads, but it is not a mobile-first company. While the company is a master of acquisitions and deserves ample credit for Facebook Connect, it hasn’t had a hit since News Feed. It products cabinet — which includes Credits, Graph Search, Gifts, Home, Poke, Paper, Slingshot, and Rooms — can most kindly be described as underwhelming.
More importantly, though, Facebook will have to prove it can win back the trust of gun-shy developers. Its lack of non-advertising-related financial partners would suggest that might be hard to do. Messenger might present a fresh platform opportunity, but it will come with the same old problems: wary developers, an inability to create winning products, and a mindset inextricably stuck in the desktop era. This time, Facebook is follower rather than innovator, takings its cues from Asia and hoping it can do a better job riding the wave than leading it.
Maybe that’s the better place for it to be. Maybe it will have more luck this time.
Maybe.
